Barack Obama clinched his party´s nomination for president in large part because the man and his message embodied his own simple motto: change we can believe in. John McCain emerged as his party´s nominee seeming to have substituted the man for the message.

McCain´s most recent major speech, panned even by stalwart Republicans, featured a backdrop emblazoned with a ridiculously familiar slogan: a leader we can believe in. If "change" is a notoriously empty set in the rhetoric of American politics, "leadership" can be just as vacuous: at least Obama is obliged to give some indication of what change is, whereas McCain may just "be". Indeed, John McCain, long known as a party maverick, has a much better track record of service than leadership. But he is a credible candidate for president whose weaknesses as a candidate, like Obama´s, may not translate at all into weaknesses in office. Right-leaning commentators have begun competing to supply McCain with a political program justified by slightly more than his persistence as a public servant.

At a crossroads, the McCain campaign must ask not just how to win but what victory means. There are perhaps two leading contenders for a set of answers that form a campaign strategy. One touts patriotic centrism and the other Republican reform. The first appeals to American passions, the second to American interests. Both are plausible efforts to match an idiosyncratic candidate with a posture fit for an election year of unparalleled fluidity. Unfortunately, neither may be enough for McCain, because he must not only run to beat Obama but to save the Republican party. Achieving the second goal is by no means assured by simply accomplishing the first. The depth of this problem reveals the seriousness of McCain´s test of leadership.

Those who wish to see John McCain run as a patriotic centrist downplay that test. Style is intended to count as substance as McCain racks up high-profile gestures toward American unity that Obama can´t match. Some neoconservatives and movement conservatives fantasize that the selection of Joe Lieberman as McCain´s running mate will crown this strategy in glory. More practical proponents of the patriotic centrist approach put forward a red, white, and blue grab-bag of issues designed to marginalise and embarrass Obama - harping, for instance, on his willingness to conduct diplomacy with members of Bush´s Axis of Evil. Redefining the Republican identity in the wake of the disastrous Bush years is left for another day. By default, however, that identity is abandoned.

Dick Morris argues, for instance, that the disjunct between McCain and movement conservatism is so complete that McCain´s best option is to run as a patriotic centrist. Key to this strategy is the assumption, popular on the right, that Obama is too polarizing a figure to win a general election. Purportedly, Obama is so "out of touch" and not "American enough" that the Republican base will mobilize itself - so the Republican candidate it dislikes doesn´t have to. Under this argument, Obama´s supposedly weird and alien nature (read: his race and his name) will drive from the Democratic party the white, working-class voters who voted en masse for Hillary. If McCain can attack perennial American bogeys such as earmarks, pork and foreign-policy weakness, he can hope for a landslide victory.

Alas, even a blowout would likely deny Republicans a governing majority. Split-ticket voting ensures that whichever Democrats do reject Obama can stuff the legislature full of Democrats. With Congressional Republicans anemic and divided, any President McCain is almost certain to face tremendous pressure to govern as a Democrat. If his entire campaign is based upon transcending "mere" conservatism with abstract Americanism, McCain will quickly become the second coming of Harry Truman - which indeed is exactly what so many advocates of the patriotic centrist approach want him to be. For conservatives and Republicans badly in need of an institutional and ideological renaissance, however, this triumph over Obama should hardly count as a victory.

Advocates of branding McCain as a Republican reformer recognize the need to supply not just McCain but the GOP itself with a fresh, compelling mission. Yuval Levin proposes that McCain lend narrative cohesion to his campaign hodgepodge by running as a competent, comprehensive reformist of the Burkean variety—preserving what works and improving what doesn´t. In place of attacks targeted to stir quintessentially American passions, the Republican reformist approach sets aside the grab bag in favour of running the table on America´s structural failings. Good government will be restored on immigration, homeland security, the nation´s regulatory agencies, and healthcare. Ideology will take a back seat. Levin is right, however, to emphasize that this doesn´t mean leaving ideas at the curb: "Institutional reform is not only about efficiency; it must also be directed to a reappraisal of ends and a careful honing of means."

The trouble is that a reform agenda takes shape ideologically as a sustained Republican apology for the Bush years. The task of reorienting the party around conservative principles becomes difficult in at atmosphere where refining government, not reining it in, is thought to suffice. Reform is urgently needed. But this means that Obama´s claim to reformism may well be far stronger than McCain´s. Obama´s organizational prowess is matched by his phalanx of sharp and dedicated policy thinkers. McCain´s camp (which has had to segue from a wing-and-a-prayer to a national presence in short order) is developing a reputation as too accommodating of ideological hacks who poorly represent the candidate´s claim to competent, non-partisan command. McCain´s reform approach has potential, especially on healthcare, but so does Obama´s. When the bar has been set as low as Bush has set it - on emergency response, education, and even the safety of our nuclear weapons infrastructure, to name a few - McCain runs the serious risk of being beaten at his own game if he makes the 2008 election a referendum on reform. As the American electorate continues its leftward slant, improving and extending institutions that conservatives oppose may be embraced under a reformist rubric.

Where does this leave McCain? Any good leader can be frank (with himself and others) about the gravity of a situation and the limitations it places on objectives. But in a tight spot, even a handful of necessary achievements may be crucial. Accordingly, the McCain campaign should think along lines such as these:

• In the wake of Bush, the Republican party will probably not recover its intellectual and ideological credibility during a McCain administration of any duration. This is not because of the insanity of one particular "-ism" but because smugness, ambition, and power combine under any political banner to produce waste, folly, and defeat - and because John McCain is, at best, a transitional figure who can prevent the party trauma of a sharp and severe break with the past.

• The Republican party, and American conservatism more specifically, must recover its intellectual credentials. A permanent-combat mentality has combined with a deadening self-congratulatory clubbishness within the walls of the ideological citadel of "mainstream conservatism". McCain is the right candidate for the GOP insofar as he can shake up dull orthodoxies and challenge complacency. But he is the wrong candidate insofar as his self-image seems grounded entirely in permanent combat and self-congratulation. These traits must be sublimated.

To do so, McCain should seize the imagination of the public and the party on a few key issues where sweeping reversals of administration policy derive clearly from his own character and from conservative principles: solvency, citizenship, and subsidiarity.

SolvencySlashing spending from the bloated Republican budget is an essential place to start—specifically, slashing the cost of the Iraq war. Americans are forgiving and pragmatic people who will tolerate foreign adventures if casualties and expenditures are low enough. Thankfully, the cost of Bush´s wars, measured in blood, is almost unbelievably low. The cost measured in treasure is almost unbelievably high. This is not a necessary trade-off, and at any rate Iraq expenses are unsustainable. High-ranking Republicans, and self-identified conservatives, believe that the war is so strong of an issue that Americans will tolerate an open-ended rise in spending both at home and abroad. Democrats unable to end the Iraq war have contented themselves to extract counter-concessions from Republicans on their own dizzyingly costly domestic programs. Conservatives worthy of the name should reject this devil´s bargain out of hand. So should McCain. If the Iraq war is to continue, it must be made affordable; given today´s political climate, only then can social entitlement spending be brought under control as well.

CitizenshipAnother counterintuitive opportunity is on immigration. The Republican party needs clear examples of how to reinvigorate itself without becoming a Democratic party for people who like war or business. One way McCain can square the circle is by replacing his emphasis on sacrifice, which may mean anything and sounds too austere, with an emphasis on citizenship, which brings tangible, recognizable goods at the very heart of American optimism. Here McCain can both borrow from Obama and challenge him. The time for making the conservative case for immigration amnesty is now—with citizenship for worthy illegal immigrants as the gift of grace afforded by the citizens of a flourishing United States of America. This gift should be accompanied by a no-excuses border control regime.

SubsidiarityConservative Republicans badly need to remember that patriotism and nationalism are not mere synonyms. It was once a Republican hallmark to believe that loving one´s country did not mean flattering its federal government as the repository of American-ness. Strong pressure from ´national greatness´ Republicans and ´compassionate conservatives´ feeds into McCain´s natural military tendency to see state and local particularity as beside the point. But McCain´s maverick political history and Arizonan heritage should lead him to embrace a return to the principle and practice of subsidiary federalism. The idea is not simply that the federal government should delegate well - real decision-making should be maintained far outside of Washington. Internal reform of the federal government is important, but real reform means returning economic and political power to citizens capable of responsibly administering their own affairs together.

Focusing on solvency, citizenship, and subsidiarity provides McCain an opportunity to combine man and message at a time when Republicans want to defeat Obama without defeating themselves. By no means is such a strategy a golden ticket for electoral success.

Among the many lessons the right must re-learn this year is which risks are worth taking and which are not. Given the amount of political capital Bush has blown, the tendency among Republicans may be to dig deeper into their pockets or seek an ideological bailout from Democratic creditors. Instead, taking a cue from the typical Republican voter, they should entrepreneurially seek new sources of income. Even if Obama wins fair and square, and that risk fails to pay off in the short term, the longer-term dividends will help prevent the Republican party from finding itself out on the street.